The Impact of Quality Assurance Policies on Curriculum Development in Ontario Postsecondary Education

Abstract

Two trends in the evolution of quality assurance in Canadian postsecondary education have been the emergence of outcomes-based quality standards and the demand for balancing accountability and improvement. Using a realist, process-based approach to impact analysis, this study examined four quality assurance events at two universities and two colleges in Ontario to identify how system-wide quality assurance policies have impacted the curriculum development process of academic programs within postsecondary institutions. The study revealed different approaches that postsecondary institutions chose to use in response to quality assurance policies and the mechanisms that may account for different experiences. These mechanisms include endeavours to balance accountability and continuous improvement, leadership support, and the emerging quality assurance function of teaching and learning centres. These findings will help address the challenges in quality assurance policy implementation within Canadian postsecondary education and enrich international discussions on the accountability-improvement dichotomy in the context of quality assurance.

Using Quality Assurance Frameworks to Support an Institutional Culture of Academic Integrity at Canadian Universities

“…Many Canadian institutions, both college and university, have some flexibility over the content required in their program review 'self-study' report (Jacobsen et al, 2018;Liu, 2020;McKenzie, 2019;OUCQA, 2019). This flexibility allows institutions the chance to expand on specific enhancement goals and commitments such as Indigeneity, work-integrated learning, and academic integrity.…”

The Inter-Jurisdictional Language of Quality Assurance: Comparing Theory and Practice

“…League tables, which could be a basis for comparative benchmarking (Lang, 2001) and to which international students pay attention, were deliberately not taken into account in the design of the QAF. Ontario has a long history of university autonomy (DeLuca, 2015;Liu, 2015). The QAF task force was necessarily aware that individual universities had diverse and distinct missions and mandates, and rarely had the same arrays of programs.…”

Investigating the participation of business librarians in academic program reviews using corpus-based methods

“…Initially focused largely on accountability, quality assurance has undergone a significant shift, with increasing emphasis now being placed on program enhancement. As part of this new orientation, in 2010, each publicly-assisted Ontario university developed its own institutional quality assurance process (IQAP) (Liu, 2015;Weinrib & Jones, 2014), and since 2011, these IQAPs have been used to guide the program review process. To secure academic standards and to ensure continuous improvement, one of the components that must be part of the IQAP is a protocol for the review of new program proposals, as well as for the cyclical review of existing programs at least once every eight years.…”